TL;DR — SEO Pricing in Sydney
$1,200–$2,500/month: Local SEO for single-location businesses with limited competition.
$2,500–$6,000/month: Growth campaigns for competitive industries. The range where most Sydney businesses build real momentum.
$6,000–$12,000+/month: Enterprise, large-scale eCommerce, or fierce verticals (legal, medical, financial services).
Hourly consulting: $175–$350/hr for audits, strategy workshops, or in-house team coaching.
Our approach: No fixed packages. Every campaign custom-scoped after a free audit. Senior consultant direct — no juniors, no account managers.
What Does SEO Actually Cost in Sydney?
The straightforward answer: it varies significantly. SEO pricing across Sydney runs from $1,200 to $12,000+ per month depending on your industry, competitive intensity, and the current state of your digital presence. That range is wide because the work needed for a local electrician in Parramatta bears almost no resemblance to what a national eCommerce brand headquartered in Surry Hills requires.
Most Sydney businesses making a serious commitment to organic search invest between $2,500 and $6,000 per month. Below $1,200 you're unlikely to outpace meaningful competition. Above $6,000 you're generally looking at enterprise-scale operations, national campaigns, or high-value industries where every organic lead is worth thousands.
We don't sell fixed SEO packages because forcing businesses into predetermined boxes doesn't serve anyone well. Every engagement starts with an audit of your site, your competitors, and your market — then we build a scope around what will actually move the needle.
Why Fixed SEO Packages Don't Work
The fundamental issue with packaged SEO pricing is the assumption that every business at a given budget needs identical work. A "Growth Package" at $1,999/month assumes a newly launched brand in Newtown needs the same deliverables as a 15-year-old practice in Chatswood with 300 indexed pages and a messy backlink history. They don't.
Pre-built SEO packages exist because they simplify the sales process for the agency, not because they maximise outcomes for the client. When every customer receives the same formula — "8 blog posts, 15 backlinks, monthly PDF" — the agency is optimising for their own operational efficiency at the expense of your results.
Our model: we audit your site at no cost, identify the specific barriers between you and page one, and scope the campaign around the work that will generate the highest return for your situation. Some clients need three months of intensive technical remediation before content strategy makes sense. Others have strong technical foundations and just need targeted content and authority building. The investment reflects the work, not an arbitrary package label.
What Drives SEO Costs in Sydney
Competitive landscape. A cosmetic dentist in the CBD competes against hundreds of practices all fighting for the same high-value keywords. A specialist marine electrician in the Northern Beaches has maybe 8 real competitors. Greater competition means more hours each month to build and defend your positions.
Your website's current health. Sites with solid technical architecture, quality existing content, and established domain authority require less foundational work. Sites plagued by crawl issues, thin content, poor Core Web Vitals, and missing structured data need significant investment before the growth phase can even begin.
Geographic targeting. Ranking in a single suburb demands less than ranking across Greater Sydney. Targeting Sydney requires less than competing nationally. Local SEO campaigns tend to be lighter on content production and link building than broader campaigns.
Content requirements. Certain industries demand continual fresh content — legal, medical, and financial services require regular updates for authority and compliance. Others can establish a strong content base once and maintain it periodically. If we produce the content, it costs more than if your team writes drafts that we optimise.
Authority building. In competitive verticals, earning quality backlinks is the most labour-intensive component of SEO. If your competitors have deep backlink profiles built over a decade, you'll need meaningful investment in outreach, digital PR, and content marketing to close that authority gap.
SEO Investment Estimator
Answer four questions to get a ballpark investment range. This isn't a quote — it's a starting point for conversation.
What Each Investment Level Delivers
$1,200–$2,500/month: Foundations
At this level, expect a tightly focused local SEO campaign: Google Business Profile optimisation, core technical fixes, on-page improvements to your highest-priority pages, and local citation building. This suits small businesses in manageable competitive environments — tradies, single-location service providers, and niche retailers targeting a handful of suburbs. You won't get extensive content production or aggressive link acquisition at this budget, but you will get a professionally managed campaign that builds genuine momentum.
$2,500–$6,000/month: Growth
This is where most Sydney businesses start to see compounding results. The budget supports thorough technical SEO, ongoing content strategy, targeted link acquisition, and monthly reporting tied to genuine business outcomes — leads, calls, and revenue rather than vanity metrics. You get a senior SEO consultant managing your campaign directly, content briefs or full production, and proactive strategy pivots based on what the data reveals each month. For most competitive Sydney markets, this is the range where investment and return align.
$6,000–$12,000+/month: Authority
Built for enterprise-scale sites, large eCommerce operations, multi-location businesses, and industries where the competition is intense and client lifetime value justifies serious investment. This tier includes everything in the growth level plus large-scale content production, digital PR campaigns, advanced technical SEO across complex architectures, AI search optimisation, and strategic consultation at a senior level. The results compound powerfully — businesses investing at this level for 12+ months typically build the most defensible positions.
SEO Costs by Industry in Sydney
Every industry operates differently. Here's what real Sydney campaigns typically look like across sectors we work in regularly:
Dental Practice — Sydney CBD
$3,500–$6,000/month
Why this range: Dental is one of Sydney's most competitive local SEO verticals. Between the CBD, inner west, and eastern suburbs, dozens of practices target overlapping keyword sets. The campaign demands strong local SEO (Google Business Profile, reviews strategy, suburb-specific pages), ongoing patient-focused content, robust technical optimisation, and sustained link building. With patient lifetime values of $5,000–$15,000+, the ROI equation works heavily in favour of consistent SEO investment.
Plumbing Company — Western Sydney
$1,500–$3,000/month
Why this range: Trade businesses thrive with local SEO because customers search at the moment of need. The campaign centres on Google Business Profile dominance, suburb-targeted landing pages, review generation, and technical health. Competition among plumbing websites is moderate — most have basic or outdated sites. A plumber appearing in the map pack for 5–8 suburbs can realistically generate 40–60 calls per month from organic search.
eCommerce Store — 800+ Products, National
$6,000–$10,000/month
Why this range: eCommerce SEO is technically demanding — product schema, faceted navigation, category architecture, internal linking at scale, and competing directly with Amazon, eBay, and Kogan. The campaign spans technical SEO across hundreds of product pages, category and buying-guide content, digital PR for authority, and CRO improvements. Even a 15% lift in organic traffic on a $70K/month store repays the campaign multiple times over.
Law Firm — Sydney CBD, Commercial Law
$5,000–$8,000/month
Why this range: Legal SEO in Sydney is among the most competitive in Australia — large firms with decades of domain authority dominate the first page. Winning requires deep authoritative content (practice area guides, thought leadership pieces), strong E-E-A-T signals (lawyer profiles, credentials, published articles), digital PR, and meticulous technical optimisation. With client values ranging from $15,000 to $100,000+, even a handful of organic conversions per month delivers significant return.
Accounting Firm — North Shore
$2,500–$4,000/month
Why this range: Professional services occupy moderate competition. Many Sydney accounting practices still run outdated websites with thin content, which creates clear opportunities for firms investing in SEO properly. The campaign targets service page optimisation, educational content (tax planning guides, business advisory articles), local SEO for the office catchment area, and building topical authority. High client retention in accounting means every new client from organic search delivers years of recurring revenue.
These are indicative ranges based on typical Sydney campaigns. Your actual scope is confirmed during the free audit — competition, site condition, geographic scope, and content needs all influence the final number.
SEO Pricing Models: Retainers, Projects, and Consulting
Monthly retainers ($1,200–$12,000+/month) are the standard for ongoing SEO campaigns. This is how most of our engagements operate — a consistent monthly investment covering technical SEO, content, link building, and strategic oversight. Because SEO compounds over time, retainer models consistently produce the strongest long-term outcomes.
Project-based pricing ($2,500–$15,000) suits one-off engagements: comprehensive site audits, platform migrations, content audits, or technical remediation projects. If you need a specific issue resolved without committing to ongoing SEO, a scoped project makes sense. We regularly support migrations between platforms — WordPress to Shopify, Magento to headless architectures — where protecting SEO equity during transition is critical.
Hourly consulting ($175–$350/hour) works for businesses with in-house marketing teams that need senior-level direction without a full campaign. Strategy workshops, training sessions, second opinions on existing agency performance, or technical audits where you need experienced eyes on a specific problem. Our rate reflects 20+ years of hands-on SEO experience.
How Our Pricing Compares
Sydney SEO agencies typically charge between $1,000 and $8,000 per month. The spread reflects enormous variation in what you actually receive. At the bottom end, you're usually assigned to a junior coordinator juggling 25+ accounts simultaneously. At the top, you get direct access to senior strategists with decades of experience and a track record to match.
Our pricing sits in the mid to upper range because you work directly with a consultant who has over 20 years of experience — no account managers, no graduates cutting their teeth on your budget. We also maintain a one-client-per-industry policy in Sydney, meaning your success directly protects our reputation. That exclusivity is part of what you're paying for.
SEO Investment vs Google Ads Costs
Sydney businesses routinely pay $8 to $60+ per click on Google Ads depending on sector. A personal injury lawyer can pay $100+ per click. A locksmith pays $20–$35. That expenditure vanishes the moment you pause the campaign.
SEO requires more upfront investment and a longer runway — typically 3 to 6 months for visible traction. But the traffic it builds is ongoing and carries no per-click cost. After 12 months of consistent SEO investment, the cost per acquisition from organic search is almost always lower than paid channels, and the leads continue flowing even during a brief pause.
Most of our clients run both in parallel. Google Ads for immediate lead flow while SEO constructs the long-term asset. Over time, organic traffic overtakes paid, and the ad budget can be scaled back or redirected to new opportunities.
SEO Pricing in 2026: The AI Search Factor
SEO pricing has evolved because the scope of work has expanded. In 2026, ranking in traditional Google results is only one dimension. Your business also needs visibility in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. That demands structured content, well-defined entity signals, comprehensive schema markup, and the kind of authoritative backlink profile that AI models use when selecting sources to reference.
We build AI search optimisation into every campaign — not as an add-on, but as a core component of how modern SEO operates. The fundamentals remain the same (technical health, quality content, authority), but the surface area has broadened. If your current SEO provider isn't measuring AI visibility alongside traditional rankings, you're only seeing half the picture.
Red Flags in SEO Pricing
If you're evaluating SEO proposals in Sydney, be alert to these warning signs:
Guaranteed rankings. No provider can guarantee a specific position. Google's algorithm weighs hundreds of factors, many beyond any consultant's control. Agencies promising guaranteed first-page rankings are either being dishonest or planning to use tactics that risk long-term damage to your site.
Undefined deliverables. "SEO optimisation" is not a deliverable. You should know exactly what work is being performed each month: which pages are being optimised, what content is being produced, what links are being acquired, and what technical issues are being addressed.
Vanity-heavy reporting. Reports packed with "impressions" and "keyword visibility scores" without clear connections to leads, enquiries, or revenue are designed to mask a lack of tangible outcomes.
Identical packages for every client. If the agency presents the exact same Bronze/Silver/Gold options to a dentist, a SaaS startup, and an online retailer, the strategy isn't tailored to anyone.
How to Get Started
Every engagement begins with a free site audit. No sales pressure — we review your technical health, competitive landscape, and keyword opportunities, then provide an honest assessment of what it would take to hit your goals. If the economics work for both sides, we build a custom proposal. If they don't, we'll be upfront about that too.
You'll understand exactly what you're investing in before you commit to anything. The audit costs nothing and the proposal is fully transparent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most Sydney SEO campaigns range from $1,200 to $12,000 per month. Small businesses in low-competition niches typically invest $1,200 to $2,500. Competitive industries like legal, medical, and eCommerce usually require $3,500 to $6,000+. Enterprise and large eCommerce operations often invest $6,000 to $12,000+. We don't sell fixed packages — every engagement is scoped individually based on your specific situation.
Because quoting a price without understanding your site, competition, and objectives would be misleading. A $3,000/month campaign could be transformative for one business and entirely wrong for another in the same sector. We provide a transparent proposal after a free audit so you know exactly what you're getting and why it costs what it does.
The three main models are monthly retainers ($1,200–$12,000+/month for ongoing campaigns), project-based pricing ($2,500–$15,000 for one-off audits, migrations, or strategy builds), and hourly consulting ($175–$350/hour for specialist advice). We primarily work on monthly retainers because SEO requires sustained effort, but we also offer standalone audits and migration support as separate projects.
Most Sydney businesses see measurable ranking improvements within 3 to 4 months and meaningful traffic growth within 6 months. Highly competitive industries can take 6 to 12 months for significant movement. Local SEO gains — particularly Google Business Profile optimisation — often show results within weeks. We set realistic timelines during the proposal process so expectations are clear from the outset.
Yes. SEO is a compounding discipline — meaningful results require sustained effort over months. We work with minimum engagement terms that give campaigns enough time to deliver genuine outcomes. The specific term depends on your scope and goals, which we discuss openly during the proposal process. The majority of our clients stay well beyond their initial term because returns keep accelerating.
It varies by client, but a typical campaign includes: comprehensive technical audit and ongoing fixes, keyword research and strategy, on-page optimisation, content strategy and production, link building and authority development, monthly reporting on rankings, traffic, leads, and revenue, and direct access to your senior SEO consultant. We never assign juniors or intermediaries — the person who builds your strategy is the person you communicate with.
Ask three questions: Can you see exactly what work was completed this month? Are your rankings and organic traffic trending upward over a 6-month window? Can you attribute real leads or revenue to organic search? If the answer to any of these is no after 6 months of paying for SEO, something needs to change — the provider, the strategy, or the reporting. We deliver full transparency across all three.